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With this opinion, that of the chief did not quite coincide. Nevertheless, according to the agreement, he commenced making preparations for departure. The cattle were driven out of the enclosure, and again started along the track, all acting as drovers, and urging the animals onward with as much energy as if they believed that the enemy was in close pursuit.
When the drovers saw the riderless horse, they supposed that Macalister had been accidentally thrown, and they sent Friday to look for him. He found him dead. The blacks had done their work quickly. They had stripped Donald of everything but his trousers and boots, had mutilated him in their usual fashion, and had disappeared.
I omitted to mention in yesterday's note that within Blythswood plantation, near to the Bridge of Inchinnan, the unfortunate Earl of Argyle was taken in 1685, at a stone called Argyle's Stone. Blythswood says the Highland drovers break down his fences in order to pay a visit to the place. The Earl had passed the Cart river, and was taken on the Renfrew side. September 9.
That puts our cattle across the Beaver, but you'll have plenty of company for the next month. Mr. Lovell has made a good talk for you boys around Dodge, and if you'll give these trail drovers this water, it will all come back. As cowmen, there are two things that you want to remember that it'll rain again, and that the cows will calve in the spring."
Any elderly farmer out yonder in the noisy market would tell you that in his young days when he first did business he had to carry coin with him, especially if at a distance from home. It was then the custom to attend markets and fairs a long way off, such markets being centres where the dealers and drovers brought cattle.
"Unlucky weather for ye, it seems?" remarked the curious landlord, who, seated in a corner of the fireplace, had for full ten minutes been watching Gilbert's knitted brows, gloomy, brooding eyes, and compressed lips. "Weather?" he exclaimed, bitterly. "It's not the weather. Landlord, will you have a chance of sending to Chester to-morrow?" "I'm going, if it clears up," said one of the drovers.
Following were the members of the medley the big butcher on his sturdy pony, the "dealer" on his black, raw-boned half-bred, the publican on his stolid old mare, farmers, drovers, after-riders, on cropped and uncropped mounts more accustomed to the slow drudgery of labour than to the rollicking, hard-going hunt; and after them the crowd on foot village children, farm labourers, and apprentices from forge and counter.
A constant stream of men passed in and out at the change-house closes and about the Fisherland tenements, where seafarers and drovers together sang the maddest love-ditties in the voices of roaring bulls; beating the while with their feet on the floor in our foolish Gaelic fashion, or, as one could see through open windows, rugging and riving at the corners of a plaid spread between them, a trick, I daresay, picked up from women, who at the waulking or washing of woollen cloth new spun, pull out the fabric to tunes suited to such occasions.
True, the Kansas cattle market had sent a little money home, but a bad winter with drovers holding cattle in the North, followed by a panic, had bankrupted nearly every cowman, many of them with heavy liabilities in Texas. There were very few banks in the State, and what little money there was among the people was generally hoarded to await the dawn of a brighter day.
Teamsters and drovers, who in those days were apt to be very thirsty, learned, even before temperance societies were thought of, to practice total abstinence on that road, and cracked their whips and goaded on their teams in full view of a most tempting array of bottles and glasses, from behind which the surly little landlord glared out upon them with a look which seemed expressive of all sorts of evil wishes, broken legs, overturned carriages, spavined horses, sprained oxen, unsavory poultry, damaged butter, and bad markets.
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